Isaac's Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
Author: Erik Larson File Type: epub At the dawn of the twentieth century, a great confidence suffused America. Isaac Cline was one of the eras new men, a scientist who believed he knew all there was to know about the motion of clouds and the behavior of storms. The idea that a hurricane could damage the city of Galveston, Texas, where he was based, was to him preposterous, an absurd delusion. It was 1900, a year when America felt bigger and stronger than ever before. Nothing in nature could hobble the gleaming city of Galveston, then a magical place that seemed destined to become the New York of the Gulf.That August, a strange, prolonged heat wave gripped the nation and killed scores of people in New York and Chicago. Odd things seemed to happen everywhere A plague of crickets engulfed Waco. The Bering Glacier began to shrink. Rain fell on Galveston with greater intensity than anyone could remember. Far away, in Africa, immense thunderstorms blossomed over the city of Dakar, and great currents of wind converged. A wave of atmospheric turbulence slipped from the coast of western Africa. Most such waves faded quickly. This one did not.In Cuba, Americas overconfidence was made all too obvious by the Weather Bureaus obsession with controlling hurricane forecasts, even though Cubas indigenous weathermen had pioneered hurricane science. As the bureaus forecasters assured the nation that all was calm in the Caribbean, Cubas own weathermen fretted about ominous signs in the sky. A curious stillness gripped Antigua. Only a few unlucky sea captains discovered that the storm had achieved an intensity no man alive had ever experienced.In Galveston, reassured by Clines belief that no hurricane could seriously damage the city, there was celebration. Children played in the rising water. Hundreds of people gathered at the beach to marvel at the fantastically tall waves and gorgeous pink sky, until the surf began ripping the citys beloved beachfront apart. Within the next few hours Galveston would endure a hurricane that to this day remains the nations deadliest natural disaster. In Galveston alone at least 6,000 people, possibly as many as 10,000, would lose their lives, a number far greater than the combined death toll of the Johnstown Flood and 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.And Isaac Cline would experience his own unbearable loss.Meticulously researched and vividly written, Isaacs Storm is based on Clines own letters, telegrams, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the hows and whys of great storms. Ultimately, however, it is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets natures last great uncontrollable force. As such, Isaacs Storm carries a warning for our time.From the Hardcover edition.
Author: Franya J. Berkman
File Type: pdf
Alice Coltrane was a composer, improviser, guru, and widow of John Coltrane. Over the course of her musical life, she synthesized a wide range of musical genres including gospel, rhythm-and-blues, bebop, free jazz, Indian devotional song, and Western art music. Her childhood experiences playing for African-American congregations in Detroit, the ecstatic and avant-garde improvisations she performed on the bandstand with her husband John Coltrane, and her religious pilgrimages to India reveal themselves on more than twenty albums of original music for the Impulse and Warner Brothers labels. In the late 1970s Alice Coltrane became a swami, directing an alternative spiritual community in Southern California. Exploring her transformation from Alice McLeod, Detroit church pianist and bebopper, to guru Swami Turiya Sangitananda, Monument Eternal illuminates her music and, in turn, reveals the exceptional fluidity of American religious practices in the second half of the twentieth century. Most of all, this book celebrates the hybrid music of an exceptional, boundary-crossing African-American artist.**
Author: Norman Levine
File Type: pdf
Divergent Paths is the first volume of a groundbreaking three-volume work. Its purpose is to explore the relationship between Hegel and Marx to define the relationship between Hegel and Engels and to distinguish between the theories of Marxism and Engelsism. Marx used Feuerbach towards the critique and ultimate transformation of Hegels phenomenology and humanism. This transformation, which cut out Hegels idealism by identifying the environment in which people produced their sustenance as the subject of history, marks the genesis of historical materialism. Marx continued to use Hegels logical categories. In chapter three of Divergent Paths, Norman Levine conducts an in depth study of Marxs 1841 doctoral dissertation, The Difference Between Democritus and Epicurus Philosophy of Nature. It is the center of gravity and controversy of Levines study. Placed alongside Hegels Philosophy of History, Levine isolates the categories Marx appropriated from Hegel to show, conclusively, that Marx was not a dialectical materialist. Levine then claims that Engels totally distorted the Hegelian legacy, and this debasement is enshrined in his 1887 essay Ludwig Feuerbach and The End of Classical German Philosophy. Levine brilliantly locates Marxism as the theory of Marx, and Engelsism the theory of Engels. According to Levine both embodied a separate view of history and society, and their contradictions are expressive, in part, of their divergent receptions of Hegel. This is an analysis like no other published to date with two more volumes planned. Philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and historiographers of Marx and Engels cannot afford to miss this study.
Author: Cornelius Borck
File Type: pdf
In the history of brain research, the prospect of visualizing brain processes has continually awakened great expectations. In this study, Cornelius Borck focuses on a recording technique developed by the German physiologist Hans Berger to register electric brain currents a technique that was expected to allow the brain to write in its own language, and which would reveal the way the brain worked. Borck traces the numerous contradictory interpretations of electroencephalography, from Bergers experiments and his publication of the first human EEG in 1929, to its international proliferation and consolidation as a clinical diagnostic method in the mid-twentieth century. Borcks thesis is that the language of the brain takes on specific contours depending on the local investigative cultures, from whose conflicting views emerged a new scientific object the electric brain. **
Author: Carl Albing
File Type: pdf
The key to mastering any Unix system, especially Linux and Mac OS X, is a thorough knowledge of shell scripting. Scripting is a way to harness and customize the power of any Unix system, and its an essential skill for any Unix users, including system administrators and professional OS X developers. But beneath this simple promise lies a treacherous ocean of variations in Unix commands and standards.bash Cookbook teaches shell scripting the way Unix masters practice the craft. It presents a variety of recipes and tricks for all levels of shell programmers so that anyone can become a proficient user of the most common Unix shell -- the bash shell -- and cygwin or other popular Unix emulation packages. Packed full of useful scripts, along with examples that explain how to create better scripts, this new cookbook gives professionals and power users everything they need to automate routine tasks and enable them to truly manage their systems -- rather than have their systems manage them.**
Author: Hans Koning
File Type: epub
The book is an idea that has finally found its time.--Publishers Weekly I think your book on Christopher Columbus is important. Im more grateful for that book than any other book I have read in a couple of years.--Kurt Vonnegut
Author: Thomas Metzinger
File Type: pdf
Were used to thinking about the self as an independent entity, something that we either have or are. In The Ego Tunnel, philosopher Thomas Metzinger claims otherwise No such thing as a self exists. The conscious self is the content of a model created by our brainan internal image, but one we cannot experience as an image. Everything we experience is a virtual self in a virtual reality.But if the self is not real, why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct it? Do we still have souls, free will, personal autonomy, or moral accountability? In a time when the science of cognition is becoming as controversial as evolution, The Ego Tunnel provides a stunningly original take on the mystery of the mind.
Author: Zachary J. Lechner
File Type: epub
With the nation reeling from the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s era, imaginings of the white South as a place of stability represented a bulwark against unsettling changes, from suburban blandness and empty consumerism to race riots and governmental deceit. A variety of individuals during and after the civil rights era, including writers, journalists, filmmakers, musicians, and politicians, imagined white southernness as a tradition-loving, communal, authentic--and often, but not always, rural or small-town-- abstraction that both represented a refuge from modern ills and contained the tools for combating them. The South of the Mind tells this story of how many Americans looked to the nations most maligned region to save them during the 1960s and 1970s. This interdisciplinary work uses imaginings of the South to illuminate the recent American past. In it, Zachary J. Lechner bridges the fields of southern studies, southern history, and post- World War II American cultural and popular culture history in an effort to discern how conceptions of a tradition-bound, timeless South shaped Americans views of themselves and their society and served as a fantasied refuge from the eras political and cultural fragmentations, namely, the perceived problems associated with rootlessness. In its exploration of the source of these tropes and their influence, The South of the Mind demonstrates that we cannot hope to understand recent U.S. history without exploring how people have conceived the South, as well as what those conceptualizations have omitted. **